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This chapter reviews the early history of the stream analogy, the
idea that homicide and suicide are linked, as it was developed in
Europe by the moral statisticians; and it discusses Durkheim's
criticism of the analogy; the same theme is traced in the works
of Freud and Dollard and his collaborators.

Abstract:

For centuries western cultural traditions in religion, language, and law conveyed an image of suicide and homicide as morally,
ethically, and legally equivalent. Self-murder was distinguished
from other felonious homicide only by the fact that the victim
was also the perpetrator. It was within this cultural context
that the earliest empirical analyses of the relationship between
suicide and homicide began to be produced by members of an
intellectual movement known as the cartographic school of
criminology, or, more informally, as the moral statisticians.
Ferri and Morselli came late in the development of this school.
By 1880 the moral statisticians had mapped the distributions of
homicide and suicide rates for several European countries and had
begun to develop analyses of fairly long time series. Over time,
they argued, homicide rates had fallen and suicide rates
increased with "the progress of civilization." These empirical
studies and others like them formed the basis for a theory of
suicide and homicide that emerged in the 1870's and 1880's from
the research of Enrico Morselli and Enrico Ferri. Morselli
emphasized the inverse relationship between suicide and homicide
in ecological data. Ferri noted that the inverse pattern noted by
Morselli also held in both short-term and long-term time series.
In rejecting Ferri's and Morselli's theses in favor of the view
that suicide and homicide are opposing social currents, Durkheim
followed a strategy similar to Tarde's (1886), focusing primarily
on exceptions to the law of inversion drawn from an array of
European sources. Durkheim, however, was unable to destroy the
notion that suicide and murder are different manifestations of
the same basic phenomenon. Sigmund Freud shared with Morselli and
Ferri the conceptualization of suicide and homicide as two
channels in a single stream of violence. Indeed, the equivalence
of suicide and homicide was a central tenet of Freud's theorizing
on aggression, which had considerable influence on clinical
perspectives of both suicide and homicide. In 1939 an
interdisciplinary team of scholars at Yale University -- John
Dollard and his colleagues -- undertook the task of systematizing
Freud's ideas on aggression and integrating them with materials
from empirical psychology, leading to the formulation of the
frustration-aggression hypothesis, which implicitly or explicitly
guides most recent thinking on the relationship between suicide
and homicide. The sociological study of suicide in the interval
between Durkheim and the mid-twentieth century was largely
dominated by Chicago-school ecological studies of suicide in
individual cities. This school linked suicide to social
disorganization, defined in terms of such indicators as
population density, social mobility, anonymity, impersonality,
and instability, all of which reduce the effectiveness of social
control. The school generally found a positive relationship
between suicide and homicide rates in the metropolitan spatial
structure.

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